Weekend in Vermont

Way back when I was playing airline pilot I was based in Burlington VT. My wife went to school with a lady that had moved to the Burlington area in the late 60's. I was there a couple of years when the National Street Rod Assn. started holding a national rod show there. I ended up building the rod pictured in an earlier post in 1997. Anyway this past weekend was the annual Northeast Nationals at the Champlain Valley fairgrounds. I left Moosup friday morning and arrived around 2:30 pm that afternoon. Hot rods every where. The best weather ever. And I bought a new Lincoln 180 wire feed welder and a wiring kit for a project car this winter. My car is not too big and fitting all our stuff and the welder, which isn't that big, into it was trying at best. The vendor helped me get the welder in behind the seat. But then he had to go back in and get the s/n for the bill. He managed to shut the passenger door and jam it on the seat back. When the door was opened the cable pull to the bear claw latch failed. We made it home using the driver door. I removed the door panel and replaced the cable with a rod. I have to do the drivers door some day because it will fail also. I have a set of Dakota Digital gauges in the car and they have been updated and calibrated a couple of times. The water temp. gauge has been reading in the 150 degree range since the last calibration and I didn't place any stock in the reading. When I got home today I opened the radiator cap and stuck two analog temp. gauges in the water. They both agreed around 160 degrees. I turned on the ignition switch and the Dakota Digital gauge agreed with the other two. 70 mph going up mountains and the big Chevy 502 peaks out at 160 degrees. I didn't believe it until today.